


Together Even Still

by downtheroadandupthehill



Category: Les Misérables - All Media Types
Genre: M/M, weird short angsty drabbleness
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-01-30
Updated: 2013-02-03
Packaged: 2017-11-27 14:16:39
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 5
Words: 1,970
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/662946
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/downtheroadandupthehill/pseuds/downtheroadandupthehill
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>He calls it making love but you call it fucking because you’re too afraid to call it what he does, like you’ll somehow make it vanish by its presence on your fumbling tongue that tastes tonight like wine instead of absinthe.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

You’re spun together, limbs and hair and fingertips, like twine, around and around until you can’t tell where you end and he begins. 

Sometimes he likes to watch you sleep, so you pretend to be asleep. You hear him whisper _you’re beautiful_ in your ear, you’re beautiful when you sleep, all the stress of the world off your face, you’re beautiful when you come, you’re beautiful when you’re _sober_ , and sometimes you don’t want to be beautiful, you just want to _be_ , and you’re afraid that won’t be good enough for him in the end.

Like that hat you knitted him for Christmas (knitting lessons from Jehan, night after night after night, and at least four pairs of needles because you kept misplacing them) red and crooked and he wore it once but never again but you kept on smiling anyway.

You end up watching him sleep, most nights, because you’re restless in that tiny bed, can’t sleep, _won’t_ sleep, you snore sometimes and don’t want to wake him. He’s beautiful when he’s asleep, like an angel in all of the cliches down to the halo of golden curls spread across the pillow and the rise and fall of his chest underneath your hand or your head. But he’s more beautiful awake, blue eyes and straight teeth and full of _rage_ sometimes but that’s when he’s most beautiful. You’ve wondered before how he can watch you and spit so much _venom_ and tell you he loves you an hour later, his breath hot against your ear and your lips and that spot on your collarbone that only he’s ever found (even with all the people you’ve been with before him.)

He calls it making love but you call it _fucking_ because you’re too afraid to call it what he does, like you’ll somehow make it vanish by its presence on your fumbling tongue that tastes tonight like wine instead of absinthe. Fucking is safe and the other thing is too precious to voice aloud.

He wants to make you feel worthy but you’re sure that you never will.

It’s enough to wrap around your throat so _tight_ until you can’t breathe anymore because your heart hurts so _much_ until he laces his fingers together with yours or slips an arm your shoulders or _him and you_ and you wonder how the flames beneath his bare skin don’t consume you both whole.


	2. Chapter 2

He smiles soft against your hip and you want to wipe that smile off his face or kiss him or _fuck_ that awful smile away because you hate how he can make you feel when he wants to. It’s easier with your lips pressed together or your cock in his throat because then he can’t tell you he loves anymore, because those words leave scars across the inside of your eyes and your skull 

and his hand fisted in your hair cold like marble. His name always tastes of salt and a hint of blood and you wonder what your name tastes like. Ashes on your own lips but there must be something he sees in you.

One night after a protest-gone-awry he comes home to you covered in bruises with blood on his chin and asks you to draw him. He’s never asked you to draw him before but you always have anyway and you never show him _him_ , you tear them out of your sketchbook and throw them away. But tonight he wants you to map his imperfections the way you’ve mapped your own in the way you drink and smoke and try not to cry at night when he’s asleep and you can’t stand being alone with you and you don’t know how he stands it either.

You draw him with a pencil too dull to capture all his sharpness, not yellow enough for his hair or violet or blue enough for his bruises. The blood on his face is a dull smear and you refuse to show him once you’ve finished but he finally lets you clean him up and tend his cut with Neosporin that Joly left in your medicine cabinet. 

He tells you he doesn’t know what he’d do without you and you laugh until your bones break and he patches you back together with bits of his skin and his spit to make them stick. 

_Mind your bruises_ you whisper as he covers you with him and tonight he isn’t so marble and maybe you’ll bruise a little less, too.


	3. Chapter 3

He arches into you like a sunflower, but you’re winter and he’s not even enough anymore.

It aches when he’s gone the next day, but of course he’s gone, you’ve been waiting for it all this time and it’s happened and of course it’s your fault and that’s that. There’s nothing left for him to fix except  _you_  and how can he expect to fix something broken beyond repair, or maybe not broken, you just came that way, in little bits and pieces that don’t quite fit. You’ve been trying to fix yourself for so long you’ve forgotten how it started or when or why and the taste of his lips and teeth (like  _strawberries_ and clean) just isn’t enough (or probably too damn much) for your shattered shards to handle.

He’s tired of playing second fiddle to the voices in your head and you don’t blame him.

His venom in your open wounds you’d take, and smile, and kiss him after.

The cigarette in your hand you finished ages ago and it burns your fingertips and it’s not enough to get the smell of him out of your (our) bedroom, and another and another and not nearly enough so you sleep on the couch instead. A bottle by your side and you forget how to exist for awhile until you need to forget again and again and  _remember_ and forget.

Another bottle in the shower you take every other night, dented and half empty and  _his_  and you tell yourself it’s just shampoo and you don’t make yourself throw it out because that would make it more real. Every other night your curls and the thistles you’ve left in your scalp smell like vanilla and spice and it’s another night you can’t seem to cry.

One word text messages sent from numb fingertips. Things like:

_Okay_

and

_fine_

until you stop responding at all

The second week you want to get sober, but you don’t want to  _be_  sober because it makes him-and-not-him tangible and gone.

You’d even take his  _I love you_ ’s now. Wish you’d had them branded everywhere he’d mouthed and traced them against you, and the smell of burning flesh overwhelms and leaves you breathless and it’s only skin.

One morning you wake up almost sober and wild-eyed and  _alone again_  and decide to paint the bedroom like you’d promised months ago. A slight high from the paint fumes, you think, and that’s  _something_ and at least you’re moving again and you’re  _you_  if not  _you and him_  again and you open the windows and leave them that way.


	4. Chapter 4

Cosette has learned to keep her father’s secrets (they’re there, haunting the corners of her eyes) and she’ll keep yours, too. A month in rehab--walls that gleam like sharp teeth, and everyone _talks_ too much and you hate it but it’s better than your old apartment, no traces of _him_ here and Cosette assures your friends that you aren’t dead ( _though you might as well be,_ you murmur, and no one hears, all talking and no listening), because if you’re dead they might come looking for your body and you don’t want them _him_ to find you here, if he’s looking. You think you hope

Your hands haven’t stopped shaking and when you’re finally home you can’t finish the bedroom wall you started. Half is white but the rest is covered in swirls of grey and red and violet and the paint that was caught in your fingernails and your cuticles is gone too, and you wonder what you were trying to accomplish in the first place. Your hands won’t stop shaking and the shadows of your eyelashes on the wall won’t stop moving and you need to learn how to be a whole person again somehow. Not _again_ though, you were never a whole person to begin with, you suspect and that makes it easier to swallow.

The small green pills you take every morning are meant to help but they make you nauseous like bees in your insides but at least you aren’t drinking anymore.

You wish you’d kept some of your old drawings but maybe that’s for the best. But you’d like to run your fingers over them and let the graphite smear across your palms and wrists until you’re elbow deep in what you’ve lost caught in a barbed wire fence around--but you _can’t_ and you pretend it’s for the best.

In rehab you took to reading to pass the time and you do that now. Battered copies of Tolstoy from the library with other people’s underlines and a few strokes in pink highlighter and you keep notes on the side to keep track of who is who in trembling, crooked handwriting. It’s not as good as painting but it’s _something_ and cigarettes keep your hands busy, too.

A book under your bed, Aristotle’s _Politics and the Constitution of Athens_ and you know it isn’t yours and you take a deep drag of the dust it’s accumulated and you don’t even cough. You could read it but you’d rather call him, and it gives you a reason if nothing else, and if nothing else it feels nice to _want something_ again.


	5. Chapter 5

He twists his calves around your thighs like a flower growing roots deep into dirt, and you let him, and you realize you’d let him and he’d let you whether you were sober or not and somehow that makes it _better_.

You’re too thin and unwell and he tells you so, not that he looks much better, like thorns digging in your hips and neck and deep into your shoulder blades but it’s the _best_ you’ve ever felt with him against you and he’s missed you as much as you’ve missed him, trembling limbs and all and you press your lips against his throat as he swallows and wonder if he’s real after all and maybe he is after all (regardless he’s worth it.)

For once there’s no whiskey no brandy no wine no absinthe on your breath or in your starry eyes and you wonder what you taste like to him, maybe toothpaste or the paint you’ve been unable to use (your hands won’t stop shaking even with him in your grasp) and you think maybe that’s what causes the worst ache. It eases as he’s in your arms--kisses along the insides of your wrists with only a hint of teeth against your veins and the lines in your palms--but even he cannot keep the dark from creeping in, but he stays the night and it’s close to enough and maybe tomorrow it will be even closer.

You wonder if you’re going about this all wrong and so does he, but he looks like shit without you and that has to mean something _magnetic_ in your hearts. You feel rare for what you think might be the first time in your life, and you try to apologize for old hurts but he won’t let you.

He tells you he loves you and you let him curve his fingers into your hair with something like reverence--not reverence, but almost and you could probably just call it love and the word doesn’t make you shrink into yourself anymore, so you tell him the same and bruises fade even someday.


End file.
